Cooler than your average comic book convention, this years British International Comic Show 2010 is being held at Thinktank Millennium Point on 16 & 17 October.
So far they have a whole bunch of comic legends announced as guests for the weekend, and are open to submissions for this years Portfolio Review.
This is your chance to show your stuff to top commissioning editors in the field, in previous years aspiring artists have been snapped up by the likes of DC, Panini and Warner Bros at BICS, going on to launch careers as professional comics artists.
There are still more events to be announced, so check their website for updates.
Tickets are now on sale, with concessions for the kids, available as either full weekend or single day passes.
I try to keep up with what great projects the Midlands arm of Hi8us are up to. For last year’s Hello Digital event they worked with a group of older people to enable them to tell their stories through digital media. Hi8us are a great resource for the Midlands and their projects, whilst being aimed at hard-to-reach young people, older people and those with physical and mental disabilities, they do it without being po-faced and by getting involved in modern and relevant media.
Spiderman, drawn by John McCrea
The latest scheme is a continuation of their work with comics, or should I say Comix.To take part in this new scheme you need to be over the age of 16 (which isn’t hard, lets face it) with a passion for comic art and live in the West Midlands. The lucky chosen few will also get to work with people on similar schemes across Europe and get a supported trip to a comic art festival in Spain, as well as a trip to the Birmingham’s International Comics Show.
20 talented individuals will get the opportunity to develop their skills with John McCrea (X-Men, Spiderman and The Hulk), Hunt Emerson (The Beano, Wall Street Journal and Fortean Times), Laura Howell (The Beano, The Guardian), and Andi Watson (Geisha, Buffy) amongst others.
Interested? Pop onto the Hi8us website.
The Thinktank at Millenium Point is hosting the Birmingham International Comics Show on 4-5 October and, with expansion this year, it’s aparently now the UK’s largest comics convention.
Unfortunately, unlike the previous incumbent of the CiB hotseat I haven’t much of a clue about the world of comics so the list of overseas and UK guests is a bit lost on me.
The website is still being put together but there’s enough info on there to give you a sense of what’s going on. In the meantime it might be worth watching this thread on the Inside Pulse forum where one of the organisers is posting updates.
Found via D’Log.
After many years of a lovely but slightly out of date website, Hunt Emerson has relaunched Large Cow where he’s selling artwork and archiving cool stuff from the past. Of particular note are pieces from the Birmingham Arts Lab which he was heavily involved with in the 1970′s such as this print:
There’s shockingly little online about the Birmingham Arts Lab other than a few mentions here and there. It’s be good if someone could write a decent history of it, or if one’s already written, stick it online and send me a pointer.
Triffic two part interview with cartoonist James Nash
(Personally It’s a joy to see someone from the Gary Panter / Matt Brinkman school working in the region.)
Picked up a rather strange looking flyer the other day for an exhibition at the Central Library called More Captioned Pictures by Robert Geoghegan.
It’s on the 3rd floor in the Arts and Lit dept and runs until the end of the month.
Lewes Herriot has been consistently uploading art to his Dark Inventory blog for months now and deserves another mention. This one’s title’s The Gilded Mountain:
His artwork is for sale and he welcomes inquiries for bespoke design for album sleeve, book cover design and posters.
He’s from Wolverhampton but I won’t hold that against him.
There’s a small portfolio on Dazed Digital and here’s his MySpace
I also understand he’s involved with the Colour night at the Quadrant Lounge in Wolverhampton, which has me somewhat intrigued. “The primary space for music and thought in Wolves” they call it. Really must pop along sometime.
Birmingham based cartoonist Laura Howell has a new strip starting in The Beano this week, Johnny Bean:
She talked about the creation a bit on her blog which is worth following if you’re of the budding cartoonist persuasion and her site has loads of examples of her work.
As a prelude to this weekend’s Comics Show Waterstone’s on the High St are holding a Comics Evening with signings, demos and tutorials from some of the guests appearing over the weekend. I’m guessing Bryan Talbot will be there, always good value, and artist D’Israeli will be doing a talk.
Comic Bits has a nice profile of Hunt Emerson, one of the most criminally underrated cartoonists in the country (and I say that no matter how rated he was) who lives and works in Birmingham and is performing with his band The Black Country Cats at the opening party of the Birmingham International Comics Show on October 12th.
From the more scratchy whirling dervish anthropomorphics of his early work, that can only be likened to a be-bopping busy bumble bee, through to the sturdier renderings of today where his black are sold and deep enough to swim in, his work is affirmed in its clarity. His panel sequences dance with the reassured understanding of a man who feels rhythm like a musician, and beyond it all, as everyone can see, he is a master at creating irresistibility funny work.
Hunt’s website hasn’t been updated since 2000 (!) but is still worth spending a long while browsing through and there’s an interview here.
Speaking of the Comics Show that launch party has been moved to Bennetts since The Cotton Club on Hurst St appears to have shut down.
Artpeeps is a new group portfolio site for West Midlands illustrators and cartoonists who’ve come out of the Hi8us workshops.
Fifteen artists are featured so far and you can track new additions to the site with this RSS feed. Here’s a piece by Amera Mussa, a Finnish illustrator based currently in Birmingham.
Hi8tus are looking at the feasibility of setting up and running a Comic School cementing their work in supporting comic book illustration through the Stripsearch program.
It’s worth emphasizing that this is at a very early stage – the tender for the feasibility study has only just gone out – but it’s worth noting as there isn’t anything like this in this country, though it was tried in London in the late 80s and early 90s. In the US there are a number of classes and departments at colleges and schools for comic art so it’s not necessarily a pipe dream.
If anyone does take up the tender and wants some contacts for those who’ve tried it before do get in touch as I can probably help you. (Your first port of call will probably be Paul Gravett.)
Here’s the consultancy brief (PDF).
This summer Stripsearch, the project that seeks out and nurtures comic and graphic illustration talent in the West Midlands, is running a bunch of free professional illustration courses under the banner Com-Motion.
Budding cartoonists aged 13 to 19 can create their own comic or animation with professionals including John McCrea, Hunt Emerson and The Brothers McLeod.
More details can be gotten from Jemima Cattel at jemima [at] hi8us.co.uk or on 0121 753 7700.
Image by Michiru Morikawa, a recent StripSearch Finalist. More of her work can be found here.
The Birmingham Mail ran a feature recently on the comic book creative community in the area. It’s a bit of a surface scratching piece, plugging the Out Of The Bedroom show that just finished, but it does give a nice snapshot of a number of people who are actively doing stuff in the region so I figured it worth pushing your way.
via D’log.
